Hello and welcome to this video where I review the Sony Bloggie in 2022.
So who am I?
I'm Big G video, and I make videos about software and gear for making videos.
The Sony Bloggie came out in 2010.
And when Sony brought it out, you can see
it's got this sticker on full HD, YouTube, 4GB of memory, built in USB.
It was high tech in 2010, but is it any good today?
So there's been loads of iterations of the bloggie, loads of versions, and they've
always appealed to me and I've always been interested in them.
So today I'm reviewing the MHS PM 5
K bloggie, and when I saw this for £20, well, I just had to snap it up.
When we swivel it around, it turns the
camera on and we can have it in selfie mode.
We can actually have it pointing forward,
which is kind of useful, and we can have it pointing like this.
So pointing, I don't know, towards the talent.
And if you close it, it turns it all off again.
This isn't a touch screen and all the controls are fairly simple.
We've got a button here to take a photo, a button here to start stop recording, a
Zoom rocker, and on and off button on the other side.
I think this is the speaker or the microphone.
I'm not sure.
We've got a little dial here, menu button here and a playback button here.
We've got a tripod Mount here.
We have something that ejects, sort of a USB.
Now, I'm worried about this.
I do worry that this bit will eventually get to detach it.
There isn't a way to detach it and I just see that's going to break.
So the camera is about the same size as a smartphone, maybe a little bit smaller,
but certainly it's about the same size as an old fashioned smartphone.
However, you're probably going to get
better footage from your smartphone, even if your smartphone is slightly old.
The camera shoots in 1080.
It shoots in 720 at 60 and 720 at 30.
And if you wanted to shoot in 1080, it only goes up to 30 frames per second.
The camera is easy to handle.
You hold it in vertical orientation, but
it does record video in horizontal orientation.
So it's really quite strange because when you turn it on, you get your video here
and you don't use the whole screen up and the screen isn't utilised very well.
However, if you go into playback mode, you
do get utilisation of the whole screen, so that's quite good.
I was lucky enough that I managed to pick up an unboxed one from years ago.
Twelve years ago, and I got lots of accessories, including a 360 attachment.
I got a four gigabyte memory stick Duo card included.
I think the camera should be able to take
SD cards as well, but I've not yet tested that out.
You put your memory card in here and the camera comes with a removable battery and
you charge it up over USB by plugging it into a computer.
In the box I also got a male to female USB
cable that just makes it easier to plug into a computer.
Lens is fixed focus and the camera is full
auto, but it can detect faces and it detects faces quite well.
But like most consumer cameras, Almost
everything is in focus anyway, So focusing on the face isn't particularly useful.
There's no shallow depth of field with this camera.
You do get steady shot, but you only get steady shot stabilisation in 720p mode.
You don't get it in the full 1080 mode.
And to be honest, it's not very good anyway.
This is not a camera you can walk with and film.
You just get bouncing all over the place.
And again, your phone could do better.
So here you can see I'm walking with the
camera in 1080 mode and it's bouncing all over the place.
You can see I'm doing a little test of the stabilisation 720p mode.
Slightly better, but it's still bouncing all over the place.
I've actually put the camera in a gimbal
And I'm going to stop talking So that you can hear the noise it makes.
The gimbal is actually vibrating because
while it does fit in, It doesn't fit in particularly well.
the Gimbal vibrates.
The balance point is about here and you
just can't get a good grip with the Zoom rocker, unfortunately.
So it was causing it to vibrate in the
gimbal and you can hear that in the footage I'm showing you.
Now. Let's talk about what I don't like about this camera.
If you hold it at arm's length, you barely
manage to get your face in really a tight and narrow field of view.
Zoom only works in 720p and it's digital Zoom, So you don't get any zooming in.
1080 screen isn't used particularly well.
You don't really need this bit down here.
You want to see what's being filmed.
It's just not a good use of the screen
really. I like this as a piece of retro tech.
And I got it Because I'm doing some retro tech filming.
So I wanted something that wasn't quite as good as what we've got today.
And this fits the bill nice and easy to put in your pocket.
It's really easy to get out and start filming.
It's pretty much idiot proof as well.
It's not as good as a smartphone, but it's pretty good for 20 quid.
Some really nice features like removable battery.
It's a little bit quirky.
It was just really nice to try out the 360 attachment and things like that.
So I will be using this on occasion.
But it's not going to give me the sharpest
picture and it's certainly not going to give me the best stabilisation.